On Christmas Day 1521, in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, the first recorded slave revolt in the Americas occurred. A group of African, likely Wolof, slaves came together with native Indians led by the Taino cacique Enriquillo to assert their independence. Beyond being the first slave revolt in the Americas, it was also one of the most important moments in Colonial American history because it was the first known instance when Africans and Indians united against their Spanish overlords in the Americas.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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213 p., A ollection of stories about the lives of 10 remarkable people in the region. From Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia and the Dominican Republic to Columbia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico, readers will come to know individuals whose lives reflect the history and immense changes underway in these countries.
Located in the eastern Brazilian Amazon roughly three hours by boat from the open Atlantic, the port city of Belém do Pará has been an important point of convergence for transnational flows of commodities, people, and culture, including a vast array of up-tempo Caribbean dance genres known locally as lambada. Since the late twentieth century, inhabitants of Belém and surrounding areas have sought to make a virtue of their liminal position between the hegemonic centers of southeastern Brazil and the circum-Caribbean. This article shows how musicians, dancers, listeners, and culture brokers draw on the local history of Caribbean cosmopolitan musicality to articulate an alternative Amazonian regional identity, one characterized by connectedness and proximity to their Caribbean neighbors rather than by isolation and provincialism. In so doing, the article contributes to the remapping of the cultural contours of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and Latin America.
83 p., Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become the main social assistance interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), reaching 129 million individuals in 18 countries in 2010. Programs shared key characteristics such as the payment of cash grants and the incorporation of co-responsibilities, but varied greatly in terms of coverage, infrastructure, routines, and even objectives. In this study, we analyze the experience of six countries (Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico and Peru) and attempt to identify important lessons for countries that have recently started or that are currently considering the introduction of a CCT.
A critical analysis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS documentary film series Black in Latin America. The authors examine Gates' presentation of blackness in Mexico and Peru. Their critique of the film focuses on the themes of national ideology, racial categorization, and portrayals of the 'black' experience.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
425 p., An anthology focusing on the musical cultures of the "northern sphere" of Latin America, specifically Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and parts of Central America.
